tidbits

I was doing a little down time web surfing and stumbled upon this run down of all-night gaming foods. It caught my attention because I do the all-night game thing on occasion, and have for years. And, every time I do, food is a part of the whole experience.

My first late-nighters were Scrabble and Rummy, with my mother. We’d eat popcorn or ice cream and drink Dr. Pepper and play late into hot summer nights. My first all-nighters were with my best friend, and we played Backgammon and Rummy, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
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The USDA has just issued a recall off Topps Meat Company’s frozen ground beef products due to potential contamination by E. coli bacteria, which can be deadly. The recall, which involves 21.7M pounds of meat, is the 5th largest. The retail stores involved in this recall are Pathmark and Wal-Mart.

E. coli causes diarrhea and dehydration in most people, but to children, the elderly or those with weak immune systems, these effects can kill. Even if you use fresh ground beef from other sources, it’s important to fully cook the meat to prevent such illness.

Seems they’ll give anything a “national month” these days, but if you’re a chili lover like myself, you might be wondering why is October national chili month? Why not in a really “chilly” month like February, when we could all use a nice, piping hot pot of chili, with or without carne?

Despite my having lived in Canada and the US for nearly 40 years, I come from an East Indian background and I cook that way. We’re like Italians and many other cultures in that we don’t measure ingredients exactly when we cook (except maybe for baking). And we only really follow recipes when a dish is new to us, and maybe not even then.

That said, the recipes on Curry Elvis Cooks will have measurements, albeit approximations. Feel free to follow them, or get wild and change things around a bit to suit your tastes. The truth is that, because I love to experiment with new food ingredients from around the world, I don’t always have a lot of experience with the more exotic items and tend to be rather conservative in their use. So feel free to try different amounts until you find something you like. With new, original recipes, I may try up to ten variations before I settle on something. The downside with not measuring, though, is that I sometimes have trouble repeating the variation I liked best. Overall, though, my recipes are a guideline and hopefully a starting point for you to find a version that you like best.